1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates generally to techniques of automatically scoring an opinion conveyed by a text message.
2. Description of the Related Art
In many cases, reviews and criticisms on products and services are made and published by distributors and advertising companies (e.g., professionals). However, a vast amount of information on user experiences and reviews has been collected into particular web sites over the Internet. Such information, which is not susceptible to any interests, could be a very important guide to other potential users or consumers in selection of products and services.
A lot of attention has been focused on CGM (Consumer-Generated Media) over the Internet, acting as media generated by a large number of non-professional consumers. More specifically, this is one of Web 2.0 sites, which has database and media using contents published by individual persons, such as blogs (Web logs), “word-of-mouth” websites, “Q&A” community websites, SNS (Social Networking Service), or COI (Community-of-Interest) websites. A wide variety of information is exchanged therebetween, which is not limited to information on products and services, but extends to content on ordinary activities of daily life.
However, information or media content handled in the CGM is extremely large in amount and complicated in substance. In addition, individual-person comments or reviews are expressed with text messages written using literal strings or strings of literal characters, in general.
For these reasons, a third party who wants to reference those individual-person comments or reviews is required to closely read the relevant text messages, because a mere sight of the text messages cannot lead to better understanding of those individual-person comments or reviews. In addition, a third party has to view text messages more difficultly for analyzing sentiments or reviews from a larger number of non-professional consumers.
Under these circumstances, in recent years, “Opinion Analysis Service” has been provided, which is a kind of service allowing text files which individual persons have transmitted or submitted to a particular website over the Internet, to be retrieved, and allowing the content of these text files to be scored or rated, to thereby perform an opinion analysis, as disclosed in, for example, the following non-patent literature:    “NIKKEI RESEARCH blogViz SENSOR,” published by Nikkei Research Inc., URL: http://viz.nikkei-r.co.jp, visited on Dec. 19, 2008; and    “DENTSU BUZZ RESARCH,” published by Dentsu Inc., URL: https://www.dbuzz.jp, visited on Nov. 22, 2008.
One of conventional opinion analysis servers for providing the aforementioned opinion analysis service, as disclosed in, for example, Japanese Patent No. 3962382, firstly inputs a text file, and, by morphological analysis, segments the input text file into morphemes. Then, this server, after scoring the meaning of each morpheme, scores an opinion conveyed by the text file. This allows a user, by a mere sight of the score of the opinion, to understand the opinion conveyed by the input text file.
Japanese Patent No. 3962382 corresponds to U.S. Pat. No. 7,475,007, the content of which is incorporated hereinto by reference in its entirety.
In recent years, as a mobile phone environment develops, transmission and submission of text files from a mobile phone to a Web server has become increasingly popular. A text message transmitted from a mobile phone, however, in many cases, defies an ordinary linguistic grammar (e.g., a Japanese language grammar), as is different from when a text message is transmitted from a personal computer.
More specifically, in the application of a mobile phone, a text message is written using “pictorial symbols” as direct representations of particular emotions. A user of a mobile phone uses such a pictorial symbol to supplement and emphasize another word representative of a particular emotion in the same text message.
However, when a known opinion analysis service is provided for a given text message including pictorial symbols, known linguistic-dependency analysis cannot be successfully performed for the given text message because of its failure to be recognized as a grammatically-correct message due to the presence of pictorial symbols. In an example, a pictorial symbol is located at a position where the subject of a particular sentence should be located.
In addition, when a known opinion analysis service is provided for a given text message in which a pictorial symbol is used to emphasize or supplement a particular emotion represented by another literal string in the same text message, the pictorial symbol is only recognized as a mere symbol per se.
Overall, a known opinion analysis service cannot successfully analyze a text message written by a user of a data terminal such as a mobile phone using a pictorial symbol, based on the pictorial symbol, even if the pictorial symbol is used as a direct representation of a particular emotion.
In view of the foregoing, it would be desirable to provide techniques of allowing an opinion which is conveyed by a text message, to be successfully analyzed and scored, even if the text message includes a pictorial symbol.